The enemy fighter’s four seconds are up and he buzzes furiously about the gunship’s hull before flaying himself in the venting column of ice, his ship practically disintegrating from a million high-speed impacts. The force of the water loss shunts the gunship in the opposite direction, its thrusters firing erratically as its crew try to get their vessel back under control. The next salvo from the guns, the work of crewmembers too caught up in the joy of devastation to stop themselves, compounds the problem, the teardrop ship spinning uncontrollably about its axis. A reaching claw of jagged ice lashes across the Wonder, wrecking thrusters and deforming its light frame, sending Rebekah spinning off into space, locked in her own fight for control.
Half-crippled she manages to regain some measure of mastery and uses what drive she has to send her ship limping back towards the Requisitioner, reaching out with her comms to see if her mothership is even still here. All that is subconscious, though. Her Crown is engrossed in the sight of the gunship’s final tumble, end over end now, half its frame obscured by a great solidified plume of ice. The catch point is not vast enough for a gravitational pull, but the gunship’s helpless drift slews it into the ever-greedy grasp of its magnetic field, which tries gamely to dispatch it to the enemy depot at an acceleration the gunship was never designed to endure. One moment there is something resembling a ship there, then there is an expanding cloud of ice and metal and a little organic material, and the catch point itself is off balance, starting to drift as it overcompensates, reacting against the anticipated mass of an asteroid that isn’t there.
Glorious, says Rebekah’s skin, and then the comms of the Requisitioner are signalling the battered comms of the Wonder, saying, Come home, come home.
5.
Thousands of years have passed, since this star fell.
Another octopus. Let us call him Lot.
Lot was born in orbit, growing to maturity within a powerful clique controlling three elevator cables and united by what they felt was a breadth of vision not shared by most of their conspecifics. From their lofty vantage point they watched the slow degradation of their people’s civilization on the planet’s surface and knew frustration and fear for the future. Amongst the octopuses, this is an unusual state: they live emotional lives of the now, consigning longer-term planning to the calculations of their Reach. By virtue of constant and complex virtual networking, Lot’s community saw further. They could measure the rate of collapse and cross-reference the rate of advancement in the orbital sciences, and plot the inevitable downward-sloping graph that led to disaster. And yes, there was a great deal of posturing; declamatory canvases of patterned skin bemoaning the grim tragedy of the times. However, the consensus was one that sought solutions and a brighter future. They funnelled resources into scientific research by other cliques more technically-minded than they. They sent delegations to other groups to fight and argue and infect former enemies with their reconstructionist zeal. For most of Lot’s life, they seemed to be constantly riding a wave of success, carrying all before them.
Then the orbital resource wars ramped up – this was just ten years ago, as Damascus counts years. The octopuses didn’t think of them as wars – just a continuation of wrestling for dominance by other means – but Senkovi would have. Skirmishes over the products of the asteroid mining, just like the one Salome and Rebekah were triumphant in, were escalating all over the system. Lot’s collective fought as much as any, justifying the violence and destruction by the ends they were working towards. To one side of their ideological territory they were being pressed by self-interested cliques who only wanted to ensure their own survival and influence, to the other by the great planetary alliances who, yes, would value any scientific breakthroughs to better their conditions but they needed those resources now in order to live. Scrapping between repurposed ships in the cold spaces between Damascus and the asteroid belt turned into an all-out boarding action against the elevator hub where Lot and his fellows made their den. It would not be quite true to say he remembers the fighting, because octopus minds don’t work that way. There is data held within the clutch of tentacles, though, and he feels the empty spaces left by colleagues and friends and kin who did not make it down to the planet’s surface. There is a fire there, too, lit on that day when he fell from the heavens down the long cable, to take his place on the crowded, angry, half-poisoned planet below. Lot’s baseline emotional state is frustrated, and frustration is a terrible thing for a species that acts directly on its emotions and expects its wider neural architecture to find ways of implementing its desires now. What if those desires cannot be fulfilled, no matter all the ingenuity one’s Reach can muster? Some problems are resistant to even incremental solutions, and that leads to a kind of feedback, a kind of madness. It makes monsters, amongst the octopuses. It makes heroes and leaders, but not necessarily those who lead anywhere good.
Lot is tormented by dreams of what might have been – not even the specifics but a constant gnawing sense that things could have been different, better. His Reach is helpless in the face of his wild desires: it cannot turn back time. All Lot knows is that there was a grandness that had been within the extent of his arms, and had he stretched them to their fullest extent he could almost have touched that golden future. There were projects for accelerated orbital farming, for toxin-filtering micro-organisms; there were genius collectives working on new ways of swimming in space, engineering minds flexible enough to squeeze through the tiny gaps left by the laws of relativity . . .
And it all came down, and now those things will happen generations too late or not at all. Lot’s entire being was transmuted from optimism to bitterness on his flight down the cable into the gravity well of Damascus, a well he knows he will never escape. The one piece of knowledge that would bleaken his outlook further would be to know that the mistakes of his people are a mirror for the mistakes of their creators.
Lot has like-minded followers, some utopianists who fled with him, others just as desperate and lost, attracted to his almost messianic demeanour. Lot has seen a future of glory and post-scarcity. The experience has marked him out, given his body language and Guise a radiance few others can match. Certainty is not a currency the octopuses are comfortable dealing with, most of the time, but Lot’s followers have lost everything, enough that they will make the cardinal sin of following without question someone who seems to know what they are doing.
Lot’s orbital community burrowed deep into the oldest records, looking for breadcrumbs of knowledge left over from their progenitors – the People of Senkovi, as they are tagged within the databases. Lot has watched, with semi-comprehension, ancient copies of copies of copies of recordings, seeing the bizarre angular forms of human beings, their mute skins, their stilted movements. He knows all about Senkovi’s commandment, the one rule that must not be broken. Here, beneath a reef of sea-life, beneath a banked mound of mud, is a secret that has slept for millennia. Here is a stretch of the sea floor that has never been colonized, despite everything, although there is a ring of industrial activity surrounding it, choking the water with pollutants and poisons.